benjamino59 wrote:But I learned a lot of new vocabulary doing the translation such as [i]evocative, insidious,

Fun side story; my friend from china in school, his last name is Yu. He was second to last on the class list. During a fire drill, meat head semi racist teacher got to him, and he said his last name was Yu. As teacher was checking, he said "It's the penultimate." Teacher asked What? and he repeated. Teacher thought he was being a smart butt for using a big word. That was almost 10 years ago and I still giggle when I remember because no one uses that word, we always say "second to last" in casual speech, but logically it was correct and his teachers made it seem like a perfectly normal word in English.

Insidious is a fairly evil word, and fun to use . But if they teach you something like chiaroscuro , use it sparingly... I always worry I'm going to learn a word like that in another language and use it socially awkwardly lol

Trapy wrote:Fun side story; my friend from china in school, his last name is Yu. He was second to last on the class list. During a fire drill, meat head semi racist teacher got to him, and he said his last name was Yu. As teacher was checking, he said "It's the penultimate." Teacher asked What? and he repeated. Teacher thought he was being a smart butt for using a big word. That was almost 10 years ago and I still giggle when I remember because no one uses that word, we always say "second to last" in casual speech, but logically it was correct and his teachers made it seem like a perfectly normal word in English.

Actually today on the bus I thought of a (what I would consider) normal usage of penultimate: to refer to something being second to ultimate, in the sense of the best/greatest. The sentence I thought of was Love is the penultimate force in the world which to me is akin to Love is the second-greatest force in the world.

vijayjohn wrote:Yeah, me, too. Haven't found it on Wiktionary, either.

Dormouse559 wrote:I haven't heard of that sense before. Only "second to last".

Really? Maybe my brain made it up! Haha. But I feel like I've heard it before in literature. Either that specific sentence or penultimate being used in that way. Or perhaps I did make it up by way of analogy - penultimate follows ultimate in the sense of last, but ultimate can also be used in the sense of greatest. Oops!

Trapy wrote:But if they teach you something like chiaroscuro , use it sparingly... I always worry I'm going to learn a word like that in another language and use it socially awkwardly lol

Yeah, I hate the fact that we're starting to read a lot of elder (older?) texts in my English class, so I'm never going to actually use most of the new words I'm learning in a conversation. Currently we're reading The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire which was published in 1924, and I'm learning a lot of new vocabulary from it, but I'm not sure which words are still used today, and which ones are simply archaic. And I've heard that they read even older texts and poetry - such as Shakespeare - in A level English classes

Fun story: The other day, I was listening to the album Pure Heroine. I always thought that the -e at the end of heroine simply was some weird New Zealandish spelling of heroin, but then I decided to look it up. Apparently, heroine is a rarely-used word meaning female hero. This type of false friends is so annoying

I completed the first two chapters of my Sound English book- the first chapter's about stops, the second one's about fricatives. It's really good, but it's hard to remember all of the rules! (for an example, it included a list of 12 rules for when to pronounce th as /θ/ and when to pronounce it as /ð/).

I've been reading a few pages in a German collection of short stories and doing a bit of my French tree on Duolingo every day. I've also been brushing up on my German grammar.

I've been thinking about dropping out of my "science college" and do the IB instead (IB=International Baccalaureate, a high school taught in English). Currently I'm only able to do A level English and take a single year of German, which is a bit sad since I really like languages. However in the IB, I'd be able to get full immersion in English and get 5 lessons of both French and German every week. I'm just not sure if I want to spend another year in school just to take those two languages, when I easily could learn them after finishing high school.

I had an interesting conversation with an old woman the other day. She speaks fluent English, German and French, and I asked her how she had mastered three languages. Apparently, when she was a teenager, everyone who weren't doing A levels in maths and physics had to study 5 foreign languages - German, French, English, Latin and Ancient Greek (and those who did A level maths still had to study the first four languages). After some years, school reformations slowly changed the amount and quality of language instruction, and 15 years ago, it was common to only study 3 languages at school. Now children only have to study English for 9 years and either German or French for 2 years. It's so sad to see that the world is becoming more and more internationally oriented, yet many Danes can't even understand why people would invest time in learning any other language than English. Even when I announced at home that I had decided to take German as an elective, the first reaction was that my sister got mad at me and kept telling me it's a waste of time. Is something similar taking place in other countries as well?

benjamino59 wrote:Yeah, I hate the fact that we're starting to read a lot of elderolder texts in my English class[...]

Elder is a noun; older the adjective.

Fun story: The other day, I was listening to the album Pure Heroine. I always thought that the -e at the end of heroine simply was some weird New Zealandish spelling of heroin, but then I decided to look it up. Apparently, heroine is a rarely-used word meaning female hero. This type of false friends is so annoying

Yay, you're listening to Lorde . I think that's just the reason for the title.

[...] Apparently, when she was a teenager, everyone who wasn't doing A levels in maths and physics had to study 5 foreign languages - German, French, English, Latin and Ancient Greek (and those who did A level maths still had to study the first four languages).[...] Is something similar taking place in other countries as well?

Over here, people don't seem to care if you study a thousand languages or not. Most of my classmates praise me for knowing not even more than ten words of at least 9 . Though, I'm not sure about other places in NA, let alone Canada.

I've been so busy with homework for my English classes! My teacher is really strict, but at least it helps me improve my written skills. I started the next chapter in my English pronunciation book, which is about approximants and nasals. (should I put a comma before which? I'm confused about the English rules for it)

I borrowed Lingua Latina per se illustrata at the library, and I am currently in chapter 3. It's really motivating to be able to read Latin texts from day 1 without the need of a dictionary, and I learn so much vocabulary - I think I've learned roughly 100 words in a couple of days.

I read the texts in the book aloud trying to mimic a Classical pronunciation, and I'm pretty sure I actually managed to roll my r's today! I'm not completely sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but I'm making some sort of a rolled-ish alveolar r-sound.

/ I was looking at the homepage of the University of Copenhagen, when I discovered an interesting major called Indoeuropean. It combines the study of 7-11 extinct Indoeuropean languages with courses in general and Indoeuropean linguistics, and it sounds really interesting. I got even more excited when I discovered that they've uploaded videos of some of their lectures - including complete courses in Gothic and Vedic Sanskrit - to their homepage (http://rootsofeurope.ku.dk/streaming/). So now I'm really wanderlusting for those two languages.

I'm also wanderlusting for Hindi, Arabic, Ojibwe, Russian, Classical Hebrew and many other languages

benjamino59 wrote:I'm also wanderlusting for Hindi, Arabic, Ojibwe, Russian, Classical Hebrew and many other languages

You should so Hindi and Arabic

I've been wanting to do Arabic for a long time, but for now I'll just try to improve my French, German and Latin before taking up any new languages, because I'm tired of never making any real progress in a language.